Embedded Glottograms in the Images of the Gods in Ancient Central Mexico

Deciphering Aztec Hieroglyphs: A Guide to Nahuatl Writing

This article examines one of the major themes of central Mexican native history-the Aztlan migrations-and attempts to establish its historical validity. Two independent sets of historical accounts are analyzed, revealing considerable consistency and agreement. First, narrative accounts of Prehispanic history concur in the relative arrival order of three major contingents of Nahuatl speaking immigrants: an early Basin or Mexico contingent, followed by one settling the surrounding valleys, and finally the Mexica. Second, arrival dates from diverse local histories throughout the highlands corroborate this tripartite ordering and provide calendar dates for the arrival of the Aztlan migrants. The resulting historical reconstruction is supported by current work in Mesoamerican historical linguistics and by available archaeological data. The various Nahuatl speaking peoples of central Mexico encountered by Cortes in 1519 traced their ancestry to one or both of two semi-mythical places in northern Mexico. According to written and oral native histories, their ancestors had migrated south from either Aztlan or Chicomoztoc several centuries before the Spanish conquest. Although the bulk of the extant information on these migrations pertains to the Mexica, the politically and economically dominant group in 1519, the Mexica in fact represent only the last of a series of migrating peoples said to have settled in the Basin of Mexico and adjacent valleys. In the sixteenth century, the inclusion of these various groups in lists of migrants from Aztlan and/or Chicomoztoc served to reinforce and validate their identities (Davies 1980:85f). Although it is often the case that such accounts of tribal or ethnic origins belong more to the realm of mythology than history (see for example Brown 1973), there are two strong a priori reasons for attributing a large measure of historical validity to the Aztlan chronicles. First, central Mexican native history is notable for its attention to chronology and record-keeping (Nicholson 1955, 1971), and the migration accounts are presented in the historical as opposed to the ritual or patently mythological portions of indigenous accounts. Second, Mesoamerican historical linguistics has established that the Nahuatl language is not native to central Mexico, but was carried south from a north Mexican hearth in the final centuries of the Prehispanic era. Since the Aztlan migrants were Nahuatl speaking, an association between the historical and linguistic movements is likely. Given the general historical plausability of the Aztlan migrations, this article attempts to determine: (1) how reliable are the native sources on the migrations? (2) who were the migrating groups? (3) when did they arrive in central Mexico? Mesoamerica is the only area of the New World in which indigenous cultures developed written historical records prior to the arrival of Europeans. Within Prehispanic Mesoamerica, four independent traditions of written history evolved-the Maya, Zapotec, Mixtec and Nahuatl traditions (Marcus 1976). The Nahuatl written histories of central Mexico are the best documented and most understood corpus of the four, due to the efforts of Spanish and native

This article reports on the sociolinguistic situation of towns in the state of Tlaxcala, Mexico, where the Nahuatl language known locally as Mexicano is spoken by a rapidly diminishing group of speakers. Ongoing ethnographic research in the indigenous region that skirts the Malinche (Malintsi) volcano in Central Mexico on language shift and linguistic ideology shows varying degrees of language retention and shift. Here I focus on the nature of code restriction to particular social spheres, contrasting language use contexts that are intimate, sometimes with more power-laden ones, locally viewed as public. I consider the types of contexts in which Mexicano and Spanish are spoken, including the disjuncture that can occur when private, intimate family languages are brought into the institutional, public sphere such as schooling for language revitalization purposes.

Shallow geophysical survey at the archaeological site of San Miguel Tocuila, Basin of Mexico

This article reports on the sociolinguistic situation of towns in the state of Tlaxcala, Mexico, where the Nahuatl language known locally as Mexicano is spoken by a rapidly diminishing group of speakers. Ongoing ethnographic research in the indigenous region that skirts the Malinche (Malintsi) volcano in Central Mexico on language shift and linguistic ideology shows varying degrees of language retention and shift. Here I focus on the nature of code restriction to particular social spheres, contrasting language use contexts that are intimate, sometimes “private,” with more power-laden ones, locally viewed as “public.” I consider the types of contexts in which Mexicano and Spanish are spoken, including the disjuncture that can occur when private, intimate family languages are brought into the institutional, public sphere such as schooling for language revitalization purposes.

Less than thirty years after the Spanish conquest of Central Mexico in 1521, the printing of books in both monolingual Nahuatl (Aztec) and bilingual Spanish/Nahuatl editions was thriving. The prestige which precontact Nahuas attached to their codices, painted on native figbark paper, was transferred early in the colonial period to alphabetical writing in Nahuatl on European-style paper. Both types of books, Nahuatl and Spanish/Nahuatl, would continue to appear until Mexican Independence in 1821. There are over 110 extant colonial Mexican imprints in the Nahuatl language,1 many of them to be found in the Huntington collections. While there are reprints, or modified re-editions, of earlier texts, the number of original works in the most widely spoken indigenous language of Mesoamerica can be counted in the dozens, almost all of them associated with the church. Those of most importance to contemporary scholars tend to cluster in a period defined by two imprints. That period opens with the earliest securely dated Nahuatl-language book, a Dominican doctrinal of 1548 entitled Doctrina Christiana en lengua Espanola y Mexicana; it closes in 1645 with the most sophisticated colonial grammar of any Native American language, that by the Jesuit Father Horacio Caro-chi, Arte de la lengva Mexicana.2 These imprints and others like them have been little studied. The lack of attention given to them is a direct result of the state of scholarship in the field of colonial American studies. Until recently the main avenue of approach to the many Native American peoples was through the records left by their European colonizers; thus, the linguistic, cultural, and historical sensibilities developed by scholars studying those peoples were honed in great measure on writings in French, English, Spanish, and

Bernardino de Sahagún is well known for having headed a major research project about the Nahuas of Central Mexico in the sixteenth century. However, many years before this project began, Sahagún wrote several sets of sermons in the Nahuatl language. This article analyzes eleven of these sermons, composed during the 1540s by this zealous Franciscan, possibly with the help of Nahua students and graduates of the Colegio de Tlatelolco. These sermons develop one shared allegory, “the House of the Soul,” by comparing the building elements of an ideal dwelling with doctrinal and moral topics and by contrasting the ways the Nahuas live their lives and build their homes to the ways the Spaniards do. In the approach adopted in this article, the rhetorical and doctrinal features of these sermons are examined, and the information they contain about Nahua households compared with other sources of the period is highlighted.

The aim of this paper is to examine contact-induced changes, visible on lexical and lexico-syntactical levels, in the set of twenty sixteenth-century petitions in Nahuatl from the region of Santiago de Guatemala. They comprise such phenomena as the creation and usage of neologisms, extentions of meaning, the adoption of loans in the morphological system of Nahuatl and the usage of calques. The material is divided in three parts. The first one focuses on specific traits of the Nahuatl language in which the Guatemalan petitions were composed, taking into account an ongoing discussion among researchers concerning the identification of this language or languages. The second part focuses on the presentation of selected lexical and lexico-syntactic changes in Nahuatl due to the influence of the Spanish language, as compared with similar contact-induced phenomena from Central Mexico and attested within the same time span. In the last part of the paper the interdependence of language contact and culture contact is discussed within the perspective of a presumed conceptual equivalency and interchangeability of the Spanish and Nahuatl terms for deer and horse, which appears in one of the studied documents.

Besides the ubiquitous patolli—a race game played on a cruciform gameboard—the Aztecs had obviously a few other board games. Unfortunately their names have not been recorded. We owe to Diego Durán, writing in the last quarter of the 16th century from local sources, some hints of what appears to be a “war game” and a second, different race game that he calls ‘fortuna’. A close examination of some Precolumbian codices shows a rectangular design with a chequered border, together with beans and gamepieces, which has correctly been interpreted as a board game. Many similar diagrams can be seen carved on stone in temples and public places, from Teotihuacan (c. 4th-7th century AD) to late Toltec times (9th-12th century AD). Of this game too we do not know the name. It has tentatively been called quauhpatolli (“eagle- or wooden-patolli”) by Christian Duverger (1978)—although this seems to have been the classic post-conquest Nahuatl name for the game of chess—or “proto-patolli”, and more concretely “rectángulo de cintas” (rectangle of bands) by William Swezey and Bente Bittman (1983). The lack of any representation of this game in all Postcolumbian codices, as painted by Aztec artists commissioned by Spanish scholars interested in the Aztec culture, is clear indication that the game had disappeared before the Spanish conquest, at least in central Mexico. No Aztec site shows any such gameboard. Fortunately this game had survived until the 20th (and 21st!) century but located in the Tarascan country, now the state of Michoacán. It was discovered, unchanged, in a Tarascan (Purepecha) village by Ralph L. Beals and Pedro Carrasco, who published their find in 1944. At that time Beals and Carrasco had no idea the game was attested in early codices and Teotihuacan to Maya and Toltec archaeological sites. In Purepecha the game is called k’uillichi. There is evidence of an evolution that led to a simplification of the game: less tracks, less gamesmen (in fact only one per player, while k’uillichi has four), and less ‘dice’. From a “complex” race game, the new debased version turned to be a simple single-track race game with no strategy at all. It is possible that this process took place in Michoacán. (A few examples of the simplified game were found in some Tarascan villages.) Also it seems the widespread use of the Nahua language, which the Spanish promoted, led to calling the game, and/or its dice, patol. As it was, patol proved to be very appealing and became very popular in the Mexican West, finally reaching the Noroeste, that is, the present North-West of Mexico and Southwest of the United States. This seems to have been a recent trend, since its progress was observed with much detail by missionaries living in close contact with the Indians along what was called the ‘Camino Real’, the long highway that led from western Mexico to what is now New Mexico in the U.S. The Spanish themselves seem to have helped the game in its diffusion, unaware of its presence. It is clearly with the Spaniards that the patol game, sometimes also called quince (fifteen), reached the American Southwest and settled in the Pueblo and the Zuñi countries. It is there that some newcomers, coming from the North or from the Great Plains, and getting in contact with the Pueblos in the 18th century, found the game and took it over. The Kiowas and Kiowa Apaches are noted for their zohn ahl (or tsoñä) game, while the Arapahos call it ne’bäku’thana. A careful examination of zohn ahl shows that it has kept the basic features of an ancient game that came—in Spanish times—from Mexico and may have been popular in Teotihuacan times. Its spread northward—through the Tarascan country—is, hopefully, well documented.

This paper addresses the use of emblems in the representation of language units in writing systems. The emblematic principle works in the early stages of writing as a transition to morphosyllabic writing; the Aztec manuscripts show the most typical examples of this. Phono-emblems function as subtitles or inscriptions to the pictorial compositions of common content. Language structure should be noted as one of the factors constraining the development of the Aztec script. It may be the polysynthesism of the structure of the Nahuatl language, which allows long series of syllables within an incorporative complex. Emblems are restricted to a certain number of positions, so they may not have been able to maintain the strict order of a morpheme row, as needed for predicative phrase; only name phrases with more transparent/predictable structure could be written phonetically. In modern writing, the emblematic principle is used along with the linearity principle: while the latter unrolls the text in the consequent order, the former represents hierarchic information as an integral graphic composition.

On the eve of the Spanish conquest aboriginal cacao cultivation extended from the two coasts of central Mexico to Costa Rica. Although the districts of greatest production were located within the Maya language areas of southern Mexico and Pacific Guatemala-El Salvador, a large and increasing market for cacao lay in the Nahua language areas of highland Mexico. To this area important amounts of cacao moved in trade from the southern zone of production. Distributions of Indian cacao cultivation have been plotted from published and unpublished primary sources. An unpublished tribute assessment list (Tasacion de Tributos 1548–51) provides the most detailed distributional information available for the significant cacao zones of Guatemala and El Salvador.